Gunman's Rap Sheet Was Long

D.c. Man Had 13 Convictions

November 24, 1994|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — The man who police say killed three law officers inside the police headquarters here had a criminal record that included convictions on 13 weapons and ammunition charges, authorities said Wednesday.

The 16-month probation he received after 18 months in jail had ended four days before the shootings, police said.

The gunman, Bennie L. Lawson Jr., a 25-year-old former college student from the District of Columbia, also was killed, police said. Two other people, including an FBI agent, were wounded. Police said the slain officers included a sergeant in charge of the "cold case squad," a District police unit that investigates unsolved homicides, and two FBI agents recently assigned to the squad.

Late Wednesday, Susan Lloyd, an FBI spokeswoman, said police found a note at Lawson's home indicating "he went to the Metropolitan Police Department with the intention of killing law enforcement officers."

As police and federal agents pieced together what happened, many questions remain. The police said Lawson never had been in contact with the officers he shot.

Police and federal agents said Lawson had been questioned earlier Tuesday in connection with a triple homicide last week. One lieutenant said that, after investigators failed to gain a confession, they released Lawson but kept his car as evidence. That angered him, the lieutenant said, and Lawson left the building apparently intent on returning with a gun.

But whether he had a specific target in mind when he returned, sometime after 3 p.m., is unknown. A federal law-enforcement official said the killings occurred by "happenstance" when Lawson asked two civilians the location of the homicide office and they mistakenly directed him to a victim's unit, which investigates older crimes.

Court records show that Lawson led a life often interrupted by arrest and punishment, starting in 1988, when he received one year's probation for a crime the records did not identify.

In 1990, he and five other members of a gang known as the First and Kennedy Crew, named for streets in his neighborhood, were arrested after police raided a house where a gang member lived and found a cache of weapons, including loaded semiautomatic rifles and handguns.

The authorities said that in his gun battle Tuesday, Lawson used a semiautomatic handgun, either a Tech-9 or an M-11/9. Both are among the assault weapons banned by the recently enacted crime bill.

Lawson spent a year and a half at the federal prison in Lorton, Va.

Eileen Sheehan, a federal prosecutor who won convictions on 13 of 14 charges against Lawson, said the case was especially memorable.

"He was associated with a group of people who were extraordinarily dangerous," she said. "We process 14,000 misdemeanor cases a year and 100 to 150 at a time. Out of all those I was working on, this one caught my eye because of the firepower recovered."

While in jail, Lawson wrote a letter to the judge who sentenced him in which he complained about the living conditions in jail and asked the judge to reduce his sentence.

But while on parole, Lawson was arrested again, last March, and pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana.

None of those crimes, however, portended anything like what happened Tuesday on the third floor of police headquarters, where federal agents and local police officers work on unsolved murder cases.